Turns out the recession may be the best thing to happen to America’s prisons in quite a while. As California struggles to devise a plan to release 40,000 inmates from its prisons as mandated by a federal court, other states are voluntarily looking to release prisoners early and exploring alternatives to incarceration in an attempt to both save money and fix the nation’s fractured prison system.

In recent months, states including Kentucky, Michigan, Colorado, Florida, New York, Ohio, North Carolina, and Mississippi have initiated early-release programs for nonviolent offenders. Not every prisoner is eligible for early release; typical participants have served time for small-quantity drug possession or minor offenses like parole violations. (In other words, felons and violent offenders don’t make the cut.)

Other states are trying alternative methods of keeping prison populations down. From 2007–2008, Texas, a state known for its tough sentencing laws, implemented drug and DWI courts designed to funnel people with drug and alcohol problems into treatment programs instead of sending them to prison. In addition to instituting alternative courts, Texas also halved probation times and increased parole rates, resulting in its prison population of 155,000 shrinking.

While the consequences of early-release programs have been widely debated, there is one benefit that cannot be ignored: releasing low-risk inmates frees up money for rehabilitative programs for current prisoners. Reducing the number of inmates currently incarcerated is one step toward improving the prison system, but significant investments in rehabilitative programming, both preventative and ongoing, must be made in order to quell the prison epidemic. The current recidivism rate in the United States hovers around two thirds; this is an astonishingly high figure that shows that the contemporary penal system simply isn’t working.

It’s not enough to let prisoners out of jail early– we also need to prevent them from returning to prison. That’s an investment we can all afford.

If you haven’t had your head buried in the sand for the last few months, you know that the United States is suffering a recession. Families, businesses, and government alike are looking for ways to cut costs, and interestingly enough, the tremulous state of the economy has inspired the Pew Center to issue a new report that encourages states to reduce their spending on corrections as 1 in every 31 adults in America is either imprisoned, on probation, or on parole.

The Pew Center’s Public Safety Performance Project, famous for its study revealing that 1 in 100 adults in the United States is behind bars, breaks down correctional expenses for offenders as such:

Inmates: $29,000 per year

Parolees: $2,750 per year

Probationers: $1,250 per year

These costs are surprisingly high. Prisoners understandably require housing, food, and medical care, but $29,000 is more than many unimprisoned people earn a year to support themselves and their families.

But what’s perhaps most surprising about these figures are the costs of keeping offenders on parole and probation. It takes a significant amount of money to monitor an individual even outside of prison. While a few thousand dollars per person per year may not seem much, when you consider the number of people in the correctional system, it definitely adds up for state governments paying the bills:

2,293,157 inmates x $29,000= $66,501,553,000 per year

824,365 parolees x $2,750= $2,267,003,750 per year

4,293,163 probationers x$1,250= $5,366,453,750 per year

Grand total: $74,135,010,500 (74 billion!) per year

These costs are directly attributable to a tripled increase in the correctional population in the last 25 years (from two million individuals to over seven million). However, while the financial costs of this ballooning population are staggering, the growing numbers of inmates, parolees, and probationers provoke an even greater expense– public safety.

The Public Safety Performance Project rightly asserts that building more prisons does not keep people safer. As an alternative, it proposes funnelling lower risk offenders through community corrections programs that hold offenders directly accountable to their communities and offer rehabilitative services that reduce recidivism (the prison re-entry rate) and thus new crimes. Offering individuals incentives to stay crime and drug free, along with incentives for community corrections agencies to improve their success rates, would save state governments millions of dollars in year by reducing the prison population and keeping individuals out of the traditional, costly correctional system. Community programs that have found success are numerous, including the New York City Justice Corps and Hawaii’s HOPE Probation.

For more information about community corrections programs in your state, click here.

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The government plays a vital role in our society. It is the institution with the sole mandate to provide essential services to citizens. The law also prohibits discriminatory treatment like the kind that might entail the hiring Los Angeles wrongful… Continue Reading →